DANIEL GOLDIN, NASA administrator, initiated the New Millenium programme. "It started in 1994 when I went out to California and had dinner with Ed Stone, the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Wes Huntress, NASA's head of science. I said we needed an order-of-magnitude improvement by the next decade.
"I want ten to 20 spacecraft launches a year. I want them to be faster, better, cheaper, but with the emphasis on better, because I want the science to be better. I want the quality better. After that I want it to be faster and cheaper."
Goldin's concern was that NASA had been investing technology in each programme separately, so he asked Stone and Huntress to conceive a programme which integrated product teams from industry and academia, to build the capabilities he wanted. "I didn't want a one-shot; I wanted to fund this thing over a decade, each year pushing the limits.
"They came up with a knock-your-socks-off programme. We are looking at lighter communications systems, with higher data rates on less power, going to higher microwave frequency and even optical communications," Goldin says. He talks about revolutions in computers, creating expert decision-making systems, which can make possible "...thinking spacecraft. This is what I mean by better science."
He wants to undertake continuing technology development and "...every year or so, to build a spacecraft to demonstrate the technology, with science as secondary. Then we can flow all that in the programme." The first mission will be using electric propulsion, to fly by asteroids and comets and "...the second will be to put an 8kg lander on Mars and it will be able to penetrate six-tenths of a metre, into the ground".
The third test spacecraft "...will be an interferometer, a distributed telescope, with two spacecraft separated by a kilometre in space, and a third craft which will collect the light from both of these".
If the craft are successful, "...we will open up the potential of taking photos of planets going around other stars". It will be a very difficult task. "We will have to control these three spacecraft to within centimetres, and we are going to have to know the exact location to one millionth of a metre - a few atomic dimensions - out of one kilometre. It is leapfrog technology. We don't know whether we can do it, but if we do, it is going to revolutionise space."
Source: Flight International
